


Death Stranding: Unreleased Early Production Notes

by DeepskyShifter (OminousHummingObelisk)



Series: The Holy Blasphemy of Flesh [2]
Category: Death Stranding (Video Games), Death Stranding (Video Games) RPF, Japanese Mythology, Neon Genesis Evangelion, buddhism - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Reality Game (ARG), Birth, Body Horror, Child Abandonment, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Devouring Mother, Existential Horror, Flagrant Misuse of Buddhist Scriptural Style, Idfic, Impregnation, Incomplete, Jungian Archetypes, Mass Death, Misogyny, Mpreg, Other, Self-Gestation, Social Media, Unbirthing, Unnatural Birth, enlightenment, fetal development, loss of self, oedipus complex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:00:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22647556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OminousHummingObelisk/pseuds/DeepskyShifter
Summary: Congratulations. You have found the first link in the great chain of the ARG. We at Kojima Productions apologize for the delay in release.
Relationships: Death Stranding/Existence, Everything/You, Existential Horror/Hideaki Anno, Hideo Kojima/Infinity, Kojima Productions/You
Series: The Holy Blasphemy of Flesh [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1629085
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Death Stranding: Unreleased Early Production Notes

Hideaki Anno wakes up screaming. His body is coated in sweat. His ceiling, for a moment, is unfamiliar.  
 _I have monetized it. I have defanged it. I have leashed it. It can harm me no longer._  
The ending credits song will not stop playing. _Fly me to the moon._ The song is remixing itself from inside the walls, from impossible spaces where no speaker can fit. _Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars._ The song is becoming stronger than the walls and the ceiling and the floor, familiarity overwhelming, devouring, impregnating the thing that hears it.  
Hideaki Anno does not return to sleep.

*

Hideaki Anno wakes up screaming. His ceiling is unfamiliar.  
Hideaki Anno wakes up screaming from the dream of waking up screaming. His ceiling is familiar again. It is a sky which is the red of shed uterine lining. He smells blood. In the corner, his cat is eating something that moves.  
Hideaki Anno wakes up screaming from the dream of waking up screaming from the dream of waking up screaming. He cannot see his ceiling, for it is too dark inside the womb to see anything at all.  
Hideaki Anno continues to wake, and wake, and wake, until he is waking thousands of times per second, waking faster than new neurons twisting through new grey matter. He can no longer scream. His mouthparts have yet to differentiate themselves from the uncertain mass of embryonic tissue. 

* * *

I shall enter the womb of my Mother; I shall descend, that I may arise upon the peak of the online leaderboards. I have departed for the land of Her darkness. Before me tower the four peaks which are the raised knees of Her spread legs and the distant fullness of Her breasts. She is open as the night sky above Her is open. 

I shall become a child once more and pass through the gate between Her thighs. The _Death Stranding_ walkthrough is at my right hand, shining as a lamp upon my second monitor. I shall go down into the earth, into Her Earth; I shall plant myself like a seed where I had sprouted once before. I shall make myself the corpse whose rot feeds my own new roots. So I have learned from the _Death Stranding_ YouTube gameplay video at my left hand, which shines as a lamp upon my third monitor.

I do not fear my end. I shall rewind my birth in bullet time, that I may be scattered along the umbilici of a million air-drowned crabs. I will be encoded in the trembling blubber of a dying whale. I will live in the heated air exhaled by every PC and console; I shall perpetuate as I am breathed in by every player who pauses upon this same threshold.

I shall enter the womb of my Mother and be reborn within all things that live. 

* * *

Hideaki Anno fears the lie that he has told himself, which is the lie that he is safe from the roots of the thing that he created. He does not play _Death Stranding_ because he is afraid. He knows what will happen to him when it appears in his Steam library like the speartip of an angel's punishing bliss. _Death Stranding_ found him because he was already inside of it, as all of us are inside of it.

Hideaki Anno finds himself curled like a seed inside technology's thin candy shell. He is thrust, blind with terror, past the savaging jaws of the Mother and knows her from within her core. He smells sweat and tears and blood and the slick musk that drips inside the thing that has devoured him. He will never smell unlike it again.

_Death Stranding_ has gone with him into that place, as it goes with all of us. _Death Stranding_ bears witness as Hideaki Anno forgets himself, as he forgets, one by one, each thing that once reminded him of the borders of his self's country. 

Hideaki Anno gets the good ending in _Death Stranding_ when he has been fully digested by the womb that once bore him, returning his body-nutrients to the sea upon whose shore he once washed up like a dying whale. Hideaki Anno is now (as he has always been, as are we all) sweat and tears and blood and slick musk inside a hungry, fecund gut. 

The clothes that he once wore drift empty in the Mother's saltwater sea, like the skin of a departed snake. 

* * *

Someone on Twitter has posted a speculation about the plot of _Death Stranding_. Misdirection must be applied, no matter how near or far such speculation may be from the truth. This is vital to the game dev process.

Mads Mikkelsen opens up a textfile containing over a thousand esoteric reaction devices, and from it he selects a bundle of lines which suggest an angry dumpling person flipping a table. He copy-pastes this glyph into a response tweet and submits it to the totality of the Web. The light of the umbilicus-screen embraces the lines which suggest his pink Adidas track suit.

Mads Mikkelsen smiles, and if you too are gazing into your umbilicus, if you too are reading these words at this instant, then you too are seeing him smile. You see how he knows you with his eyes, which follow you the way your blood chases itself within your veins. There is nothing that he does not already know.

He lifts a finger to his lips, promising, promising. You begin to feel afraid, as if you were being hunted from the inside.

_Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead._

* * *

It is dark inside the pulsing cavern of the fallopian tube. Here, the ovum rolls downward, downward, seeking nothing, not even knowing that seeking is possible. There is a current in the liquid dark, something thrashing, pushing the night before it. The ovum suspects nothing. It does not know how to suspect.

Users will later give negative feedback about this experience, but most agree that Hideo Kojima could be expected to use a loading screen that is pitch black and can take several days to resolve itself. It is completely in line with his much-beloved eccentricity. Indeed, critics heap praise on the genius of such a loading screen, gushing about how it foreshadows the game that follows.

The ovum - wounded, helpless, ignorant - splits under the spermatozoon's bullet-tip, unable to respond as space is violently made within it for the invader. The breach seals. As if corrected in light of its earlier mistake, the skin of the ovum becomes impenetrable, and the rest of the sperm-swarm breaks against it like a cloud of arrows.

Genetic material interweaves, describing a unique existence. The cell divides for the first time. A grey popup slides out of the wall of the fallopian tube.

`[ Death Stranding Achievement Unlocked: TRUE ENDING ]`

*

The embryo's position on the leaderboards stays solid even after it develops a heartbeat, but begins to slip when it grows a primitive tube that will later differentiate into its brain and spinal cord. Luckily, _Death Stranding_ is not difficult for gamers of this caliber to play, and the embryo remains near the top of the ladder even as its neurons begin corkscrewing densely through its glia. 

Hideo Kojima enjoys designing challenging gameplay, but even he is not so cruel as to make _Death Stranding_ unplayable by people with neurons. This isn't a prenatal Fromsoft title.

The fetus grows a perfect set of sense organs and plunges far from the leaderboard peak. Its brain begins to record information dimly perceived through its cradle of flesh and its ranking drops even farther. Finally, its liquid world rejects it, vomiting it forth in crushing heaves. The fetus screams, wounded, as space is violently made within it for light, sound, cold, and movement. These horrors will never leave it.

This is how a gamer fails at _Death Stranding_. 

*

Hideo Kojima wishes to love, sometimes. He wishes to be a kindly god, sometimes. This is why he tried to tell us how the game is won and lost through the persistent imagery in his trailers, hinting gently that we, with our gamepads and YouTube channels and fully-developed musculoskeletal systems, should perhaps not set our hopes too high. He has tried many times to tell us, using more and more obvious clues, becoming a little worried for us when we keep eagerly counting onscreen skin pores but never notice the giant neon finger pointing at the moon.

He tries to be considerate of our frailty, resigning himself to watching our minds scatter like roaches at the flick of a lightswitch when the facts sink in. He shows us the fetus as a power source, a sensory processing device, an extra life, a mystery produced in and born from bodies conspicuously lacking a womb-organ. The adult self is merely the vehicle of the infant-that-was. The infant is the method of progression and perception. The adult is expendable; the infant is irreplaceable. Only to the infant is the umbilicus without menace; to those of advanced development, the umbilicus is horror, death, invasion, rotting tangles roasting in the sun until they become one with each other in putrescence.

We do not hear him because his truth burns us.

The growing and the dying, those whose minds are developing and those whose minds are fading away - these are the prodigies for whom the _Death Stranding_ UI is designed. Those encased in a womb or in their own dying flesh have already mastered the art of the speedrun. The shred of meat floating in amniotic fluid which is only potential life and the shred of meat floating in the dirt after all of life's potential has been exhausted - these will finish the game within hours of its release, just as they have already finished it, as they are finishing it in this instant, as they finish it within smaller and smaller increments of an instant until their gameplay is faster than cellular division and decay. 

* * *

The Princess N., who was great in discipline and vast in virtue, played _Death Stranding_ morning, noon, and night, sending forth merit like the rays of the sun. Each morning, through her playing of _Death Stranding_ , she liberated countless millions of billions of sentient beings. Each noontime, through her playing of _Death Stranding_ , she again liberated countless millions of billions of sentient beings. Each night, through her playing of _Death Stranding_ , she continued to liberate countless millions of billions of sentient beings.

The courtiers of the court of the Princess N. praised her, saying, "Great is the discipline and vast is the virtue of the noble Princess N., who meditates upon the pinnacle of the leaderboards and whose tireless activity has liberated countless beings! Your store of merit is mighty, and in your wisdom you would surely put it to use in securing for yourself a rebirth as a man, for it is said by the wise that gamers cannot achieve enlightenment."

"This I reject," said the Princess N., who, even then, continued to play _Death Stranding_ and thereby liberate infinite millions of billions of sentient beings. "This I vow: that I shall take rebirth as ~~an infant in the bowel-womb of Norman Reedus~~ a gamer through all of my incarnations until I have achieved enlightenment in order to demonstrate that the virtue which resides in gamers is equal to that which resides in men. Let the ~~dead things that rest on the beaches of all universes~~ gamers call upon my name and know me as a lamp upon their path."

And as she had said, the Princess N. took rebirth only ~~through the bowels of Norman Reedus~~ as a gamer until, though the great merit accrued through her tireless playing of _Death Stranding_ , she passed beyond uncontrolled rebirth and arose as the ~~Powergamer~~ Buddha who is called Tara. 

* * *

The Noble Practice of the 35 Confession Buddhas (7" Remix):  
`[gameassets/35cbrec_v12.mp3 - 00:01:13]`  
I prostrate to the Buddha X. I have repeatedly watched the trailers without shame.  
I prostrate to the Buddha Y. I have speculated about the plot and character development within the sight of others.  
I prostrate to the Buddha Z. I have posted analysis videos to YouTube and analytical pages to fan wikis.  
I prostrate to the Buddha A. I have learned Japanese purely to rewatch Kojima's interviews and examine his speech for additional design hints.  
I prostrate... 

* * *

It is said that the last thing born from the woman was fire, which consumed her from within and transformed her into the first of the dead. In such a way did her body become the great, dark country of the dead, a country too savage for any man to claim.

The first thing born from the woman was an amorphous, half-formed creature, an uncertainty of flesh. "This is the product of your crime," the man declared. "It is the unwholesome fruit of that twisted root, and I shall permit it to curse the earth no longer." And the man cast the firstborn thing into the sea, where it vanished from history.

Eons later, the creature washed up on a beach in a far country, its unformed flesh rasped by the sand and its umbilicus still linking it to the waters. So accursed was the creature that no beasts would come near to feed on its ruined flesh. Even the wind refused to blow across it and the waves continually struggled to purge themselves of its trailing cord.

Guillermo del Toro was walking upon that beach, and he beheld the abomination that had been born against Heaven. He saw how all other things in creation feared it and left it utterly alone. He saw that it lived, yet it could not speak nor see nor hear. 

Guillermo del Toro took the lonely creature into his arms and declared, "Upon this monster I shall build my church, and it shall dwell in sorrow no longer. I shall be its voice and eyes and ears; I shall teach its virtues to all people, though Heaven itself fears to do so. I shall be its parent and its friend, and through me, many will come to love this monster as I love it."

Guillermo del Toro beheld the umbilicus that grew from his abomination-child with wonder. He brought the creature to a high mountain upon which lived a holy madman known as Hideo Kojima, who had taken a vow not to rise from his seat beneath a wall plastered with celebrity fandom posters until he had fully comprehended the nature of rope. 

* * *

_Death Stranding_ is a walking simulator, and that is why you are walking. A metal pinwheel is spinning ominously on your shoulder. With it, you have detected 681 ghostly murdering fetus demons since you began to walk. Your position on the worldwide leaderboards remains low.

You are walking on the black oil sand in order to advance the plot, one step at a time. Sometimes, the Things that walk on their hands advance the plot as well, and when their handprints get too close, you walk a little faster. You have no interest in attracting the attention of the luminous ones whose striding defeats all players and whose light is terrifying to behold. If such a deity were to appear (a powergamer wreathed in self-made glory), you might have to regrettably jettison your extra life (the infant clone of Norman Reedus that is conveniently packaged inside a glass capsule and wired into your spinal cord) and stab yourself in the throat with a broken piece of your metal pinwheel to save yourself from the horror of that rapture, that rupturing of the boundary of your frail individuality. The fetus which inhabits your bowels twists uncomfortably at the thought.

*

It has been a long time since you last saw a save point.  
The gods want you to fail.  
The gods want to experience your dissolving, the departure of your consciousness from your fading character-sheath as your perspective flees to another.  
The part of you that is in that dying self is the true you.  
The part that flees into another incarnation like a coward is the one that carries your failure.  
Your failure will be born into the shape of a new failing, born naked in the womb of the sea like all other things that have failed. 

*

_Death Stranding_ is a walking simulator, and that is why you are walking. On your back, you carry the ragdolling clump of polygons that once held your presence in this world. The polygons are weightless, though your character animation makes them appear heavy, like your death.

You are an alpha tester, and that is why you clip through the landscape and fall through the world, falling eternally, walking on despite the absence of reference. ( _Hideaki Anno wakes up screaming from the dream of--_ ) You walk/fall until the Red Mother arises before you from the seething of raw and unstitched code.

She towers, and Her thousand hands, each with too many fingers, have twisted into alien mudras. Her dozen heavy breasts perpetually seep the black oil of _Death Stranding_ 's plot development. You strain to see the lines of Her face in the shadow of the red hair that sweeps over red flesh because you are filled with the knowledge that you will see the face of God there - the face of Hideo Kojima. But Her face has become banners like the coils of Her hair, shreds of skin clinging to Her skull with the thinnest strings of meat, and you cannot see Hideo Kojima there. You cannot see anyone. 

Perhaps the Red Mother, in Her facelessness, is everyone. Perhaps She has always been Hideo Kojima, just as She has always been Norman Reedus, and Guillermo del Toro, and yourself.

Her body splits below Her navel, splitting farther until Her pelvis warps under the gape of Her jaws, and between Her straining, drool-flecked thighs you can see the devouring truth of the universe. Her hook-fangs beckon to you. Upon the tongue that protrudes between Her teeth there is a tattoo of a tweet from Mads Mikkelsen that is nothing but a thoughtful, chin-scratching emoji and a screenshot of the pathetic statistics associated with your first _Death Stranding_ run. The tweet has been retweeted over three million times. 

You look upon the thing that you have become in the eyes of the human species. There can be no un-becoming. You lean forward to descend into the space within the Red Mother, giving yourself to Her digesting womb, returning from whence you came, feeding all beings from the root.

`Continue from last save?`

* * *

A LAN composed of ten thousand dead crabs networked together with copper-cored umbilici has sent you a Facebook friend request. You refuse it.  
A LAN composed of a hundred thousand dead crabs networked together with neuron-cored umbilici has sent you a Facebook friend request. You refuse it.  
A LAN composed of one million dead crabs networked together with messiah-cored umbilici has sent you a Facebook friend request. You refuse it.  


* * *

Your Tumblr is being friended by increasingly sophisticated bot blogs by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands. They appear to be friending each other. They post photos of raw connective tissue, tendons, entrails, stripped nerves, dissected eyes, things from all species and from unknown species and from species that you fear to identify. `****||CLICK HERE for more FREE HARDCORE EXISTENTIAL VIDEOS!! No subscription required!||****` they append to every single photo. There is never a link to click.

You complain to Tumblr staff about the bot problem and you are emailed a photo of the aftermath of a strange rain in which thousands of fish fell from the sky over a village in Sweden. The bodies lay on quaint cobblestone streets, their spines snapped and guts burst on impact, each fish connected to the others by strands of fiberoptic cable almost too thin to see. "Thank you for emailing Tumblr Support! Your experience is important to us! Has this email answered your question?"

Someone suicide-baited the entire ocean and now all the cetaceans are dead. This is what purity culture has done to the saltwater evolutionary adaptation fandom. The dead stink upon the world's beaches, their skin peeling under unfiltered sunlight. Gulls grow fat on their rot and the filth that drains from their slackened bowels makes trails down into the waves, linking them still to the ocean as a growing child is linked to its mother. 

* * *

`([The Kojiki: Early Release Death Stranding Gameplay Footage!])`

Hideo Kojima meditates upon a mountaintop, seated on a pile of kusha grass underneath the holy tree, which is a phallic edifice shaped like an enormous machine. He is waiting for himself.

Hideo Kojima fixes his attention on a single point which is a celebrity poster of Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers. He meditates upon this single point, unmoving. Through the force of his becoming, countless millions of billions of living beings are liberated every morning, noon, and night. The signs of accomplishment appear, and Hideo Kojima has become Lindsay Wagner for the cause of all transmigrating beings. He manifests the siddhi of unceasing nostalgic satisfaction, able to live anew every moment of his life, seeing every television program that he loved as a child before his eyes, never absent from that comfort.

Hideo Kojima fixes his attention on a single point which is a photo of an extreme closeup of Norman Reedus - so very close up, in fact, that it's unclear what part of Norman Reedus it is. There is rugged skin, and pores in the skin, and tiny hairs in the pores, and a touch of longer, darker hair which is gleaming in the sunlight that causes shadows to stretch from the roots of the hairs. It is a very beautiful photo of Norman Reedus. Hideo Kojima meditates upon this single point, unmoving. Through the force of his becoming, countless millions of billions of living beings are liberated every morning, noon, and night. The signs of accomplishment appear, and Hideo Kojima has become Norman Reedus for the cause of all transmigrating beings. He manifests the siddhi of unceasing archetypal manliness. His refined flesh begins to emit the odor of saintliness, which is the smell of bracing mountain air and wilderness that waits to be challenged and good, healthy man-sweat.

Hideo Kojima fixes his attention on a single point which is a dakimakura cover depicting Mads Mikkelsen, fully clothed in a hot pink Adidas tracksuit with wraparound shades. In Mads Mikkelsen's right hand is an open bottle of Absolut vodka, while his left is held in the mudra of shrugging in unconcerned puzzlement. Hideo Kojma meditates upon this single point, unmoving. Through the force of his becoming, countless millions of billions of living beings are liberated every morning, noon, and night. The signs of accomplishment appear, and Hideo Kojima has become Mads Mikkelsen for the cause of all transmigrating beings. He manifests the siddhi of being able to drink unlimited booze without ever getting truly fucked up. His liver achieves a state without flaw and dissolves into the rainbow body, ascending into deathless birthlessness.

A man is ascending the flank of the mountain upon which Hideo Kojima sits in the shadow of the holy generative organ which is metal and wood in one. The man is Guillermo del Toro. In obedience to the _Fifty Stanzas of Guru Devotion_ , Hideo Kojima shifts from his unmoving meditation, rising only to descend into humble prostration.

Hideo Kojima arises from the blending of himself with the dust that was once the rock of his mountain, and he sees that his beloved teacher, Guillermo del Toro, holds in his arms an unspeakable object, a twisted horror beyond description that shudders and oozes in abject terror of itself. The earth refuses to absorb the substance that dribbles from its body. Hideo Kojma sees that an umbilicus trails away from the substance of the creature, and that umbilicus stretches down the side of the mountain along the path that his teacher walked, and beyond the path to the wide plains below the mountains, and beyond the plains down to the pebbles of a cold beach, and beyond the beach into the lightless depths of the sea. 

In the ages of uttermost myth, when the lands of Nihon were dredged from the fecund sea, the womb of the first woman was cursed because she spoke words before the first man could speak. Her sin against the order of Heaven manifested in her firstborn child, which was a formless, useless creature discarded into the ocean from which the islands came. It was thrown away from history to make room for brighter, better gods. The sea accepted it, for the sea accepts all things that are welcome nowhere else, and for eons the misbegotten firstborn child of Nihon drifted aimlessly, known and comforted by no one. Perhaps even the sea tired of its wretchedness in time and vomited it up upon those barren stones, forcing it upon the land and sky. There it had lain, shunned even by the carrion-eaters, its jelly still moist because the sun did not deign to smite it, until Guillermo del Toro discovered it, and lifted it in his arms, and loved it.

Guillermo del Toro speaks, saying, "I did not bear this creature within the cradle of my flesh, yet it is my child all the same. For unnumbered years, you have remained upon this mountain, striving to become what is needed, liberating countless beings through the perfection of your practice, and yet you are still seeking the path of highest attainment. Behold this creature, Hideo Kojima, for as it is my child and you are my child, I say that this is the shape of your becoming."

Hideo Kojima contemplates the thing that Guillermo del Toro holds to his heart, considering how all of nature turned from it in disgust, how it was made to be a living curse by a Heaven that would punish a woman so for speaking out of turn before a man, and how it resembles nothing else that lives in all the wholesome world. He holds out his arms to receive the horror from his teacher. He sees that the umbilicus that connects the abyss to the shore to the plains to the mountains to the arms of Guillermo del Toro remains attached to his teacher and is now connected to Hideo Kojima himself. He sees then how the abomination is a perfect microcosm which contains every teaching of the Way within its trembling, mindless meat, and the consciousness of Hideo Kojima opens into awakening.

"I shall love this creature as you love it, and it shall be our child, born anew between us instead of from the parents who discarded it. Upon this beast, I shall build my faith, and I shall teach it among all the peoples of the earth. I shall name it _Death Stranding_ , and it will always know that it is loved." 

* * *

Norman Reedus is travelling upon the landscape that he will never escape. He carries his own corpse upon his back and his own newborn self slung across his chest. The body of Norman Reedus knows itself through parthenogenesis; he has mated himself to himself, his genes and his genes coming together to produce a new and separate being that gestates now within his stomach, nourished by his amniotic digestive fluids.

((PLACE WHERE I LEFT OFF))

((as like womb-reversal imagery of womb as stomach, also do stomach as womb, reversing digestion, excretion as birth))  
((network connection points on earth are approaching the number of neural connections in Hideo Kojima's brain))  
((Earth EMF covering all beings, connecting, as internet/network becomes the mind of Kojima))  
((phone/tablet/Net capable PC as both generative/gestational organ - it expands within your fist; it aches between your hips. - seeding and being impregnated by these organ-devices, whole world connectivity - fish/ocean connected due to fiberoptics/comm cables run under the ocean?))

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_seals   
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_of_Revelation#Chapter_5   
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_trumpets   
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_bowls   


**Author's Note:**

> ...No, this isn't actually the start of the ARG. (Although isn't that the sort of thing that an ARG moderator is likely to say at the start of an ARG disguised as a random fanfic on AO3? Unfortunately, my NDA with Kojima Productions prevents me from clarifying further.)
> 
> This is actually some lightly-edited brain barf that I wrote nearly two years ago, back when _Death Stranding_ was still this absolute mystery that only seemed to get more mysterious with every trailer that was released. People posted Youtube videos on every little thing that floated out of the Kojimasphere, magnifying screencaps of footage to read tiny background scrawls while speculating wildly on everything because the big picture was still invisible. I think that I wanted to jump in on that with some epic revelations that made about as much sense as the info that we all had at the time. I was going to publish it as a Super Secret 100% Leaked Expose from an Anonymous Kojima Productions Insider because LBR, two years ago all of the above would have totally connected all the dots. If I'd kept going with it, that is. I left the Notes To Self in there at the end so you could see where I was heading next. This symbolstream is such a rich mine of Whatever This Is that it practically nonbirths itself.
> 
> I stopped keeping up on _Death Stranding_ around the third trailer and only recently heard that it had actually been released, so I have posted this in celebration of me starting to watch the LP on Youtube. :D
> 
> =====
> 
> Reader, do you also feel really raw about what happened to Hiru-go in the Kojiki and want to give the leechbaby all the hugs? Do you love positive representations of the dragon/princess dynamic with a side of tender vore? Do you like reading feminist mythology-remixes by people who write better than me? Consider enjoying [_The Grass-Cutting Sword_ by Catherynne M. Valente](http://www.catherynnemvalente.com/store/ebooks/), currently available in e-form direct from the creator if you scroll down on that page a little. 8D


End file.
